The Substance of Things Hoped For
by Elspeth.Davidson
Summary: Oneshot, title subject to change. No particular time frame just the thoughts of an unnamed soldier on the long journey.


**The Substance of Things Hoped For**

I have never seen a garden.

Oh, I've seen pictures, of course. But a seeing a picture is not the same as being in the picture; an image cannot give you the fresh, rich smell of soil and new sprouts that I've decided must be there. There must be breezes, too – not much, but some – softer cousins of the gusts that lash down city streets between skyscrapers, heavy with garbage and rotten smells and others that I don't even want to guess. And sunshine – I know that sunshine doesn't have a smell, because we have that in cities, too; but it seems to me that in a garden it might have a scent. Something terribly bright, maybe, but I haven't decided yet.

I don't know why I'm writing this, scribbling on a sheet of scrap in the barracks when I'm on sleep-shift, squinting in the gray light. I do know that I don't feel like sleeping. Maybe it's because of the sheer inactivity of life in transit. Sure, as soldiers we have training and duties, but there's only so much you can do in the limited space of a starship.

I know that there are ships with gardens on them, but I've never been on one. I know that my homeworld has gardens, and even wilderness, where plants grow without human care, but I was never rich enough to get out of the sprawling human wilderness. My life, like those of so many others, has been one of concrete and steel, old wiring and bullet-proof glass. Even this pillow, which is supposed to be something soft to lay your head on at night, is more useful as a writing surface. I've seen softer cinderblocks.

Why am I growing so attached to this idea of a garden? Am I turning this idea over in my mind, wrapping it in layers of perfection that, like glass lace, will shatter at the first discordant note of reality?

That was a good line, actually. I'm going to have to remember it. I'll probably never use it, but you can never tell. Somehow, it may work its way into a story or poem, into the growing pile of scribblings hoarded between my thin sleeping-pad and the shelf that is called my bed frame. I've been writing for a long time. Since childhood, I think, but I've never shown anyone. It's a very private thing for me – letting my mind overflow onto paper, easing the pressure inside. Maybe it makes me feel important, too. Thoughts look more significant when they're clothed in black ink.

Maybe someday I'll try to publish a book. I don't know what it would be about. Me: an author – now that's wishful thinking.

Some writers have desks, like officers do, with soft yellow-orange light spilling from pretty lamps, and shelves full of leather-covered books, their titles printed in silver or gold. And, I think, they have windows. At least, I would have windows. Big windows of sheet glass, crystal-clear and not bullet-proof, the kind that can open all the way. They would look out on my garden, of course, and they wouldn't have curtains or shades. I wouldn't even have to move to see the sky burning up in sunset - instead of orbital bombardment - and the horizon would have trees and hills with more trees, and maybe even a lake, with the color and depth and sparkling blue of my mother's eyes. That's one of the only things I can remember about her.

And I would have a garden. I don't know how big it would be. Maybe I would make it so that you wouldn't be able to tell where the man-made garden ends and what they call 'nature' begins. I do know that I wouldn't have a fence. Everything in my life has had fences, or barricades, or walls. There have always been 'Keep Out' and 'Danger' and 'Caution' signs, bright orange and red and dirty white on poured concrete and weathered chain link. If asphalt streets and tinted glass buildings were gardens, those signs would be the flowers – the bright spots of color and focus.

But they are not flowers. Flowers are decorations, not warnings.

I don't even know what types of flowers there are. But I would have the most fragrant ones, and the biggest ones, and the smallest ones, in every color imaginable. I've seen pictures of flowers, and I've always thought it strange that, with flowers, all the colors seem to go together, even if you start off thinking that they won't.

I want to see life peek out of a dry, dead seed and pretend that the green leaves are springing out of an armor-piercing bullet. I want to feel soft, black, living soil between my fingers and wash it off with fresh, icy water from a slightly rusted iron faucet, not scrub painfully at chapped, blistered hands after burial detail. I want to hear birdsong in the branches of evergreens as I whisper to flowers, instead of screaming every morning at the fighting crows that used to gather on the garbage cubicles outside the unit barracks, ready to gun them all down so I could get five more minutes of sleep.

But most of all I want to see life. I want to see innocent life – beauty that will never disappear except in the cycle of renewal, will never witness violent death, be scarred by our own destructiveness, or even hear harsh words.

I want redemption.

I want a new Eden and a new creation.

I don't want to think about the world we left behind. The crows aren't there anymore. Neither are the pigeons. Neither are the songbirds that must have been in the wilderness that I never got to see.

I don't want to picture the empty streets of our cities, which used to be busy twenty-five hours a day, or see the charred silhouettes of daily life freeze-framed, burnt into walls and buildings by nuclear flash. I don't want to hear the moans of the already-dead as they huddle in their misnamed bomb shelters, those people left behind because of life-support limitations on the evacuation ships. We are a cruel race, whether out of necessity or not.

But we must go on. We are the human race, and because I am human, I'll wake up in seven hours, eat my morning rations off of a grimy plastic plate, drink my instant coffee from a chipped mug, and proceed with my duties for the day. I'll walk the rattling corridors in my synth-leather boots, perform my hours of physical training with my fellow soldiers, and breathe the grease-scented atmosphere processed by the expired filters. When my unit orders, made tinny by static, are piped through the intercom, I'll obey without question. Whether guard duty, escort duty, or morgue duty, they are still duties – duties to humanity; duties to our survival.

But we will reach Earth someday. It may not be tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year, but it will be one day, stealing up on us like a thief in the night.

And when we do, I will have a garden.


End file.
